First Reading: 2 Samuel 7:1-11,16
Psalm: Luke 1:46b-55
Second Reading: Romans 16:25-27
Gospel: Luke 1:26-38
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Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.
From my limited sport memory as a child, I do recall regularly playing kickball during recess. In our three 15 minute breaks varied through the day, inevitably, as a class, the majority organized for a game of kickball. Before beginning the game, we would organize teams by the captains of the class picking teams. With the voluntary players lined up along the wall, the captain chose players one by one. Of course, the captain – in similar fashion to the NBA draft – would pick players that would help the team win. I was invaritably the shortest and smallest player and rarely picked. My best skill was first base quickly running the ball to take out a run at the first base. But, even at first base I would often falter. So, you can understand my amazement when in preparing the game, Jason Brinkman, choose me… first… for his team! I was astonished, someone fearful and overwhelmingly grateful. For that recess period, I was a favored one.
Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.
Twice Gabriel lets Mary know that she is the recipient of God’s favor. We would do well to ask further, what does this mean to be favored of God.
Popularly, those with wealth or good fortune, political craft and points, the role models of sports and good moral behavior are some way or another considered to be in God’s good grace and favor. Somehow God likes someone to be placed in a good station of life it is often thought.
But from the Gospel of Jesus, we come to know that God chooses Mary because she has nothing. She is young. Mary is a girl in a society that values men. Mary’s song identifies herself as lowly and poor.
Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.
The Gospel lesson for today is commonly called the annunciation because it is when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she is to not be afraid, that she is favored by God, and that she will bear a son and his name will be Jesus. In short, a messenger of God tells unexpected lonely perhaps forgotten Mary that God is about to start God’s own occupy movement called ‘Occupy Mary’. In fact through Mary, God will occupy not just Mary and not just Bethlehem but will occupy the whole world.
The book The Gospel in Solentiname, tells about Bible studies on the annunciation in Nicaragua. The author Ernesto Cardenal tells about campesinos, farmers and fisherfolk who lived in the countryside read this story of Mary’s news and hear Gabriel’s greeting of favor extended not only to Mary but also to them as well. For this savior, this liberator is going to be born among them, the people who were poor. “It’s not the rich but the poor who need liberation,” says one. “The rich and poor will be liberated,” answers another. “Us poor people are going to be liberated from the rich. The rich are going to be liberated from themselves, that is, from their wealth. Because the are more slaves than we are.”
If we are to be an advent people preparing for this Christ Jesus to come into our world again this Christmas, than we dare know that God is real.
God is prepared to enter our lives and free us from all that enslaves us to liberate us from sin.
God does the work of coming to occupy our lives to restore, reveal and redeem the world with the good news of justice and peace
So Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.
A father reclining on the couch, half sleeping, half watching a football game, when the kids came into the room.
“Dad, we have a play to put on? Do you want to see it?”
He really didn’t want to, but he knew he needed to, so he sat up, came out of his slumber, and became a one-man audience.
His four children, four, six, eight, ten years old, were the actors: Mary, Joseph, and the wise men. Joseph came in with a mop handle. Mary came in with a pillowcase under her pajamas; another child was an angel, flapping her arms as wings.
Finally the last child, the eight year old, came out, with all of the jewelry on that she could find in the house, her arms filled with three presents. “I am all three wise men,” she said. “I bring three precious gifts: gold, circumstance, and mud.” (James Moore, Won’t You Let Him In? An Advent Study For Adults, page 30.)
The father didn’t laugh. The father didn’t correct the wise man. The father reflected on the word that somehow got to the heart of the Christmas story: God loves us for who we are, our gold–where we are at our best; our circumstances–where we might be even now, even our mud–where we are when we are most human.
God chose an ordinary human being–Mary–to be the vessel through which the Son of God would be born. What is impossible for us is possible with God. God can take our gold, our circumstance, our mud, and do something glorious with it.
And how does Mary respond? Perhaps you might respond the same as well. Mary’s response is “How can this be?” This awareness that we are not fully in charge is repeated in our lives. Just when I think that I have appointments set and assignment to complete in the morning when I awake, some days seem to have their own other plans in store than what I had prepared. Starting news to us in life – joyful or sorrowful = can evoke Mary’s question for us as well, “How can this be?” When a tumor shrinks or a precarious blood count is corrected contrary to the prognosis. Likewise, when a friend dies suddenly can stir us to exclaim, “How can this be?” When a collective calamity falls on a university campus or national economy with rapid homelessness in the United States of America of all places, we too, begin to grasp Mary’s puzzlement to take time to adjust to news, to question whether the tragedy or trials are real or understand what God’s promises might mean for our lives. Mary’s query, “How can this be?” is the refrain of a daily life of faith.
When an employee is offered a promotion or job, they too may feel like the favored one and sense Mary’s emotions of unworthiness or unreadiness. That God should choose to favor us in our seemingly random or forgotten lives, we too ask: “how can this be?”
Mary’s doubts are met with Gabriel’s assurance that the Holy Spirit will overshadow her that God will accompany and not abandon her. Mary’s struggle’s are met with the promises that with God nothing is impossible. God will come into Mary’s flesh as she is an agent of God bringing salvation to the whole world in the birth of Jesus.
To being a servant of God, Mary hears the angels message and says, “here I am Lord, let it be, according to your Word.”
Mary wasn’t the first to say these words. She stands in a long line of witnesses who have been brave, or ignorant, or joyous, or adventurous, or grateful, or obedient enough to say to God’s request, “Here am I.”
Noah said, “Here am I,” when God told him to build a floating zoo.
Abram said, “Here am I,” when God told him to pack his things, and go to an unseen land God.
The boy Samuel said, “Here am I,” when he is told he is to speak the truth to the king Saul.
And Mary, this young girl, ponders everything and says: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord.”
Mary’s words are God’s Christmas wish, that we too are favored by God, that we too believe that nothing is impossible with God, that we too invite the Holy Spirit to sustain us, that God would occupy our lives, our city and our world.
Greetings favored one! The Lord is with you.
The Rev. Jason Bense
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer
Sacramento, California
